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Praying for Independence

a
Helen Gardner
a
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and
Education , Deakin University
Published online: 31 May 2013.
To cite this article: Helen Gardner (2013) Praying for Independence, The Journal of Pacific History,
48:2, 122-143, DOI: 10.1080/00223344.2013.781761
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The Journal of Pacific History, 2013
Vol. 48, No. 2, 122–143, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2013.781761
Praying for Independence

The Presbyterian Church in the Decolonisation of Vanuatu
HELEN GARDNER
Downloaded by [Case Western Reserve University] at 10:37 07 November 2014
ABSTRACT
The establishment of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides in 1948 as an independent church
was viewed by some participants as a step towards the independence of the nation, which occurred some
32 years later. This paper argues that the church was slow to promote an anticolonial perspective through
the 1950s, though, as Indigenous clergy took on more senior roles in the church, there was a
corresponding increase in political consciousness. The trans-colonial experiences of many young clergy
– for education around the region or for meetings in the newly formed Pacific Conference of
Churches in the 1960s – exposed participants to anticolonial theologies and the decolonising Pacific.
When Indigenous clergy gained full control over the Presbyterian Church in 1973, they
simultaneously demanded the end to the Condominium.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MISSIONS, COLONISATION AND COLONIALISM IN THE PACIFIC

Islands is a recurring theme in the history of the region, yet there has been little
secular historical analysis of religious institutions and the decolonisation of the
Pacific.1 This is surprising, as the churches and missions of the Pacific were either expli-
citly or implicitly involved in the decolonisation of Pacific Island colonies: they had the
ear of colonial administrations, encouraged nascent forms of political representation,
largely trained the independence generation and reached deep into village life. As a
Helen Gardner, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University.
E-mail: helen.gardner@deakin.edu.au
Acknowledgements: The author acknowledges the assistance of Deakin University in providing a travel grant to research in
Vanuatu in 2010 and the support of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre as well as the help of those interviewed for this
paper. It has been improved by the anonymous reviewers, the editors of The Journal of Pacific History and corrections
and suggestions from Sethy Regenvanu, Terry Brown, Randall Prior, Dorothy Regenvanu and others who lived
through these events. Most particularly the author acknowledges the significant help provided by Malcolm Campbell,
whose long involvement in Vanuatu and ongoing work on recording the lives of those in the church has been of
primary importance to this paper. His generous assistance was crucial to the analysis and details of this paper.
1
On the role of mission in the colonisation of the Pacific, see Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant missions
and British imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Leicester 1990). For a more recent global survey on the relation-
ship between mission and empire, see Norman Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire (Oxford 2005).
© 2013 The Journal of Pacific History, Inc.

PRAYING FOR INDEPENDENCE 123
result, the parliaments and cabinets of the decolonising nations included clergy of all
denominations, and the Indigenous elite spread the gospel of independence and deco-
lonisation through the networks of both church and state. Asian and African scholarship
leads the way in the secular investigation of the Christian churches in the processes of
decolonisation.2 In the Pacific, however, it is church historians who have researched this
important phenomenon and in the case of Vanuatu have edited a range of publications
on church and nation with contributions by leaders who moved between pulpit and par-
liament.3 Based in part on this literature, this paper traces the processes of decolonisa-
tion through the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides (PCNH) and examines the
role of this church in the formation and promotion of national consciousness. Scholar-
ship on this theme is further encouraged by the anthropological ‘turn’ towards the study
of Christianity in the Pacific in the last 15 years, offering historians new analyses of the
localisation of international religious movements.4
From the foundation of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948,
clergy and congregations in the Pacific were increasingly influenced by a new
liberal political agenda for a just world based around sovereign, self-governing
nations. As the new nations in the Pacific emerged during the final phase of post-
war decolonisation, many Pacific churches were further influenced by the Marxist lib-
eration theologies of the 1970s. The first parliament of the independent nation of
Vanuatu included a number of continuing or former clergymen – Catholic, Anglican
and particularly Presbyterians – as well as many theologically literate lay people. This
paper considers the local, regional and international influences on the Presbyterian
clergy from the post-war period until independence in 1980 and argues that the
regional experiences of the Presbyterian elders and clergy in the 1960s shaped their
political and anticolonial consciousness.
Church Independence
For many Christian missions around the world, calls for decolonisation from colonial
rule spurred the formation of independent churches. In the 1950s and 1960s, African
2
The recent collection edited by Brian Stanley is focused exclusively on the colonial empires of Asia and Africa; the
Pacific is notable by its absence. Brian Stanley (ed.), Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids 2003). For
an overview of the literature on Africa see Frans J. Verstraelen, ‘Contrasting aspects of African decolonisation processes
and missions in West and Southern Africa: Ghana and Angola as case studies’, Zambesia, 29:1 (2002), 38–42. In relation
to Asia see Tun-Jen Cheng and Deborah A. Brown (eds), Religious Organizations and Democratization: case studies from con-
temporary Asia (Armonk 2006), 3–40.
3
For a general overview of the churches and decolonisation see John Garrett, Where Nets Were Cast: Christianity in
Oceania since World War II (Suva 1997); Charles W. Forman, ‘Finding our own voice: the reinterpreting of Christianity
by Oceanian theologians’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 29:3 (2005), 115–22. The church-based literature
on Vanuatu is extensive and includes Brian Macdonald-Milne and Pamela Thomas (eds), Yumi Stanap: leaders and leader-
ship in a new nation (Suva 1981); Malcolm Campbell (ed.), Remember Your Leaders, vol. 1: Moderators and Clerks of the Pres-
byterian Church of Vanuatu 1948–2008 (Portarlington 2009); Randall Prior (ed.), 25 Tingting: reflections on 25 years of
independence in Vanuatu (Wattle Park 2010).
4
A number of anthropologists have investigated the importance of the churches in village and then national poli-
tics. See for example Robert Tonkinson, ‘Kastom in Melanesia: introduction’, Mankind, 13:4 (1982), 302–5. Annelin
Eriksen, ‘Healing the nation: in search of unity through the Holy Spirit in Vanuatu’, Social Analysis, 53:1 (2009), 53–81.
An insightful if historically limited chapter on church and state in post-independence Vanuatu can be found in
William F.S. Miles, Bridging Mental Boundaries in a Post-colonial Microcosm: identity and development in Vanuatu (Honolulu
1998), 87–118.
124 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY
missions of all denominations followed the Asian lead and began to separate from the
home missions to become independent churches, usually – though not always – pre-
ceding political independence.5 Australasian Presbyterian missionaries served with the
Presbyterian Church of Korea, which became independent in 1908, and supported
nationalist criticism of the Japanese occupation.6 The Presbyterian mission to
the New Hebrides was a particularly early example of church independence in the
Pacific and separated from the Australian and New Zealand assemblies to form the
New Hebrides Presbyterian Church in 1948. The independence of the church was
part of an ambitious ten-year plan to reform the mission, led by the Reverend
Victor Coombes, a former missionary to India who was influenced both by inter-
national church moves against colonialism in the period prior to World War II and
by the long Presbyterian struggle against the Anglo/French Condominium.7 He
was supported by Victorian minister and former missionary to Korea, George Ander-
son, who made a prophetic statement on the self-determination of the church and the
nation, following a tour of the islands in 1943:
It is becoming increasingly plain that the future of the New Hebrides must lie with the
people of the New Hebrides. There will be difficult and uncomfortable periods,
perhaps for a generation, but it is surely quite necessary that the leadership of the
Church, with our encouragement and help, must be brown, not white.8
Coombes’s post-war vision of decolonisation was clear. In his outline for the indepen-
dence of the church he spoke of the demands of ‘backward peoples’ for ‘self-
expression, self-determination and to an extent, self-government’.9
Yet while the church decolonised in name, it has been argued that the rhetoric of a
‘self-governing, self-propagating church’ fell short of the reality. Lake insists that all
decisions on finance and education were effectively controlled by a white missionary
council well into the 1960s.10 The independent church was not the result of demands
by the local clergy as the level of Indigenous ordination was low, though it still out-
stripped those of other churches in the region. Kamisetea was the first ni-Vanuatu
pastor, ordained in 1895. In the years between his ordination and the independence
of the church, only 32 ni-Vanuatu were made pastors, nearly half of whom were
5
The Presbyterian Church in Ghana became independent in 1950, the same year the Catholic Church established
a separate province; the Methodists followed in 1961. See Frans J. Verstraelen, ‘Contrasting aspects of African deco-
lonisation’, 42, n. 20. The Presbyterian Church of Nyasaland (Malawi) became independent in 1960. John Stuart,
‘Scottish missionaries and the end of empire: the case of Nyasaland’, Historical Research, 76:193 (2003), 411–30. The
Anglican Archbishop Fisher oversaw the creation of new provinces in the decolonisation of the Anglican churches
in West Africa (1951), Central Africa (1955) and East Africa (1960). Sarah Stockwell, ‘Splendidly leading the way?
Archbishop Fisher and decolonization in British colonial Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36:3
(2008), 549.
6
Paul Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America (West Nyack 2001), 63.
7
Malcolm Henry Campbell, ‘A century of Presbyterian Mission education in the New Hebrides: Presbyterian
Mission educational enterprises and their relevance to the needs of a changing Melanesian society, 1848–1948’,
MA thesis, University of Melbourne (Melbourne 1974), 171–86.
8
George Anderson, quoted in ibid., 208.
9
Victor Coombes, quoted in ibid., 226.
10
Barry Lake, ‘The educational policy of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), 1948–1980’,
MA thesis, Murdoch University (Perth 1985), 34.
ordained in the 1940s in the rush to meet the needs of the new assembly.11 A clue to the
level of participation of local church members in the independent church can be found in
the order of service for the inaugural assembly: Pastor Kalorib offered the prayer of invo-
cation, and Pastor Samuel was one of the two scripture readers. The sermon, declaration
of inauguration and history of the mission were all given by Australasian missionaries.12
Despite this inauspicious start, the inaugural assembly of the independent church
included seven ni-Vanuatu pastors and at least 15 elders, also an ordained position
and not to be underestimated in church and village life, or in national politics following
independence. By the following assembly, ni-Vanuatu pastors had more than doubled to
17, with 21 ordained elders, and they easily outnumbered their 14 Australasian counter-
parts.13 Victor Coombes attended the next three assemblies to assist in guiding the con-
stitution through the strict Presbyterian process of meetings and committees.14

Australasian missionaries of the 1950s and 1960s have been criticised from both
within the church and without for thwarting or delaying Indigenous leadership and
resisting the rising nationalism of younger pastors. In his autobiography, pastor and
politician Sethy Regenvanu described his dismay at the level of theological education
offered by the Tangoa Training Institute in the 1960s and the continuing paternalism
of Australasian missionaries.15 The British administration, seeking a path to indepen-
dence, was frustrated that the ‘third force’ of Presbyterianism in the colony, while long
opposing the ineffective Condominium, was not supporting the nationalism essential
for the development of an educated anti-colonial elite.16 This was in direct contrast to
the Church of Christ in the northern islands led by Abel Bani from Aboa, who forged
an alliance with Jimmy Stevens, the leader of the Nagriamel movement. Their com-
bined effort against land alienation in Santo was the most effective anti-colonial move-
ment in the islands during the 1960s.17
This paper considers the historical conundrum that, while there is clear evidence of
Presbyterian paternalism and a reluctance to countenance the independence of the
New Hebrides among some Australasian missionaries in the 1950s and 1960s,
11
I am grateful to Malcolm Campbell for supplying me with a list of the pastors of New Hebrides/Vanuatu and
their ordination dates. For comparison, five ministers were ordained in the Methodist Church on New Britain between
1920 and 1930. Roslyn V.L. Bryce ‘The Methodist mission in New Britain from 1914–1945 with emphasis on the
development of Indigenous leadership, BA (Hons) thesis, University of Sydney (Sydney 1968), 29–33. In an appendix
to his draft paper for the Fourth Waigani Seminar on Mission, Father Patrick Murphy noted that Papua New Guinea
had 19 native priests and 460 overseas priests in 1967. Patrick Murphy, From Mission in New Guinea to Church in New
Guinea, 1970, Ian Fardon Papers on the Methodist Church in Rabaul, Canberra, Pacific Manuscripts Bureau (here-
inafter PMB), PMB 1169, reel 2, 17.
12
‘Order of service for the inauguration of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides, 1 July 1948’, in
J. Graham Miller, Live: a history of church planting in the New Hebrides, vol. 6: The northern islands (Port Vila 1989), 51.
13
Roll of the Assembly 1949, Minutes of the First Session of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the
New Hebrides, 1949, New Hebrides Presbyterian Mission Minutes of the General Assembly 1950–74, PMB DOC 219.
14
Ibid.
15
Sethy John Regenvanu, Laef Blong Mi: from village to nation (Suva 2004), 58–65.
16
R.N. Hamilton, Australian Commission Suva, Report to the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, 11
May 1965, Canberra, National Archives of Australia, CRS A1838 338/1/1 Pt5.
17
Michael Morgan, ‘Politik is poison: the politics of memory among the Churches of Christ in northern Vanuatu’,
PhD thesis, Australian National University (Canberra 2003), 5–6, 105–36; A.L. Jackson, ‘Towards political awareness
in the New Hebrides’, The Journal of Pacific History, 7 (1972), 159; Howard Van Trease, The Politics of Land in Vanuatu: from
colony to independence (Suva 1987), 127–68.
nevertheless the PCNH became a key player in the independence movement in the
1970s. Unlike the Anglican and Catholic Churches, the democratic political structure
of the Presbyterian Church allowed the institution openly to back the call for indepen-
dence, as decisions were made from the body of the church rather than imposed by a
church hierarchy. By contrast, many Anglican and Catholic priests were deeply
involved in the independence movements though their churches sought to maintain
at least a semblance of institutional separation from colonial politics. It was clear to
observers, however, that the Anglican Church covertly supported independence,
while the Catholic Church echoed the efforts of the French Administration to covertly
delay or thwart political change. This paper traces the paths to a national conscious-
ness for the Presbyterian pastors of the 1960s and 1970s. It examines particularly the
rise of political activism through regional engagement with the theological colleges of
the Pacific as the radical theologies of social justice swept Latin America and the Third
World churches. These ideas were spread through the New Hebrides in the crucial
decade of the 1970s as ni-Vanuatu Presbyterians gained full control of the church
and became leaders in the independence movement. Australasian missionaries of
the late 1960s and 1970s were also drawn to the radical theologies of period, and
many became active partners in the political activities of their ni-Vanuatu counter-
parts. Further, recent works by church historians Malcolm Campbell and Randall
Prior suggest that the spark ignited by the young ni-Vanuatu pastor activists galva-
nised the older church leaders into support for Presbyterian demands for indepen-
dence.18 During this period, Presbyterian pastors initiated the shuffle between
pulpit and first the Advisory Council of the New Hebrides and then the Parliament
of Vanuatu. Clergy politicians continue to characterise the politics of Melanesia gen-
erally and Vanuatu in particular.
Following the inauguration of the church, Presbyterian pastors gradually took on
more important roles and were paired as chaplains with Australasian moderators to
learn the tasks of church leadership. Moderators lead the committees that govern
the church at each level: session (a committee of elected elders from a single
church), presbytery (elected elders from a group of churches) and the general assem-
bly, which was defined first by the colonial then national border. The latter is the
‘supreme court’ and meets annually with all the ministers of the presbyteries and a
representative elder from each of the sessions. At the general assembly, the moderator
begins the meeting with a sermon, takes the votes of the members, announces
decisions and ensures they are properly recorded and implemented. Moderators,
elders and clergy are well versed in the procedures of meetings and in Presbyterian
polity, which has scriptural backing as the form of government set forth in the
Bible.19 In Vanuatu, the role of moderator is held for one to two years and is the
voice of the church in local, national and international forums, ensuring leadership
in the months between assemblies. He (the role has never been held by a woman)
visits presbyteries and sessions to canvass the concerns of congregations.20 Pastor
18
Campbell, Remember Your Leaders; Prior, 25 Tingting.
19
Rules and Forms of Procedure in the Courts and Congregations of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria: adopted by the General Assem-
bly of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria, May, 1862 (Melbourne 1862), 15.
20
Campbell, Remember Your Leaders, 1.
Saurei of Fila Island in the Vila ‘charge’ was nominated for moderator designate for
1951, but the procedures were questioned and, following a new call for nominations,
the Revd Murray won the vote decisively 35 votes to five.21 The church was indepen-
dent for seven years before the first ni-Vanuatu moderator, Salerua Poruza, was suc-
cessfully nominated in 1955.22 He undertook the teacher/catechist course in the late
1920s and was active as an elder and teacher in the South Santo area as well as
Tangoa. Yet he was not ordained until 1947, when he joined the rush of ordinands
in preparation for the independent church.23
Ni-Vanuatu clergy used the assemblies as a platform to voice their political con-
cerns. In 1955, Thomas Kalmar, who became the second ni-Vanuatu moderator in
1959, moved a motion along with elder Kaltak from Erakor, condemning the
influx of Japanese into the New Hebrides for the fishing industry and demanding
the Anglo/French Condominium take steps to give ni-Vanuatu a voice in the govern-
ment. Afraid that land, women and shellfish might be at risk from these new migrants,
Pastor Saurei and Pastor Albert moved another motion to voice their concern that the
chiefs had not been consulted before the Japanese fishermen arrived.24
As Clive Moore demonstrates in this special issue, the Anglo/French adminis-
tration in the New Hebrides trailed the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea
in developing a forum for local representation.25 Two years after Kalmar’s demand
for a ni-Vanuatu presence in colonial affairs, the Condominium finally established
an Advisory Council in 1957 with limited ni-Vanuatu involvement, most notably
Dr Kalsakau, trained in Suva at the Fiji School of Medicine. The council was com-
posed of the two resident commissioners, two official members and 12 nominated
representatives of the major ethnic groups: four British, four French and four ni-
Vanuatu.26 In recognition of their role in the provision of health and education ser-
vices, the major churches held office: the Anglican and Catholic Churches were rep-
resented by Bishop (later Archbishop) Rawcliffe and the Roman Catholic vicar
general. In the early years, New Zealand missionary Robert (Bob) Murray was the
Presbyterian representative, chosen for his fluent French and his ease with British
and French settlers and administrators.27 In the mid-1960s, he demanded greater
Indigenous representation. In 1968, the New Hebrides Advisory Council was
21
Minutes of the Second Session of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides, 1950;
Minutes of the Third Session of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides, 1951; Minutes
of the Fourth Session of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides, 1952, PMB DOC
219.
22
Minutes of the Seventh Session of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides, 1955,
PMB DOC 219.
23
24
Ibid., 50. Minutes of the Seventh Session of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the New Heb-
rides, 1955, 28–9, PMB DOC 219.
25
On the Solomons see this issue, Clive Moore, ‘Indigenous participation in constitutional development: the case-
study of the Solomon Islands Constitutional Review Committees of the 1960s and 1970s’, The Journal of Pacific History,
48:2 (2013).
26
Ian L. Grey, ‘The emergence of leaders in the New Hebrides’, MA thesis, University of Auckland (Auckland
1971), 120–1.
27
Campbell, Remember Your Leaders, 19–20.
reformed to consist of 14 indirectly elected private members: three British, three

French and eight Melanesian.28
Thus, while Presbyterian political consciousness in relation to the colony seemed to
be relatively undeveloped in the early 1960s, ni-Vanuatu pastors were developing the
administrative and political skills necessary for managing an organisation that trans-
cended village and island boundaries, using a political form that translated readily
to the standards of contemporary democracy. As ni-Vanuatu Presbyterians gained
experience in the sessions, presbyteries and assemblies of the Presbyterian Church
and met the strict protocols for meetings, they took their expectations of government
to the Advisory Council. Presbyterian Pastor Titus Path served on the council as an
Indigenous representative from 1963 to 1971, though he had a fundamental com-

plaint about its systemic failure as a representative body. He noted that while the
1968 reform increased the numbers of ni-Vanuatu from four to eight, or two more
than the European representatives, it was still an unfair proportion, given the size
of the ‘native population’.29
Church Regionalism
Prior to the 1960s, few ni-Vanuatu Presbyterians travelled beyond the borders of the
colony. The New Hebrides shared with other Pacific colonies the regional opportu-
nities of the Fiji Medical School, and occasionally students were sent to church board-
ing schools or to live with returned missionary families.30 A few students undertook
basic Christian education in Australia. While most sending churches had more than
one mission in the Pacific and moved staff between them – the Methodists, for
example, had at least six missions in the region and students and island missionaries
travelled across colonial borders – the New Hebrides church was the only Presbyter-
ian Church in the islands, though the Australian church had missions to Aboriginal
communities. The PCNH did form links with the Protestant churches of New Cale-
donia, and from the early 1950s ni-Vanuatu pastors travelled to Noumea to minister
to ni-Vanuatu students and workers.31 In turn, the Eglise Évangélique offered trained
pastors to work on the internal mission on Malekula.32 The isolation of Presbyterian
pastors and elders changed in the 1960s with the growth of the ecumenical movement
and a new church regionalism in the Pacific, led by Pacific pastors and ministers.
In 1961 the Congregational Theological College at Malua in Samoa hosted a large
meeting of protestant churches from around the Pacific: Anglican, Congregational,
Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian. The idea was the brainchild of Pacific clergy-
men Fijian Revd Setareki Tuilivoni and Tongan Dr Sione Amanaki Havea, who had
28
Hassall, ‘Religion and nation state formation’, 259.
29
Gray, ‘The emergence of leaders’, 10.
30
Kalpokor Kalsakau, later minister of finance in the first parliament of an independent Vanuatu, lived with
returned missionary family the Jamiesons for his education at Scots College in Melbourne. William Mete, ‘Kalpokor
Kalsakau’, in Macdonald-Milne and Thomas, Yumi Stanap, 23.
31
Graham Horwell, A Voyage of Discovery: the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides, 1948–1980 (Christchurch 2006),
26.
32
Ibid., 11. The Eglise Évangélique achieved independence in 1960. Charles W. Forman, ‘The impact of colonial
policy on the churches of Tahiti and New Caledonia’, International Review of Mission, 77 (1988), 16–17.
attended ecumenical conferences while stranded in Australia in the 1940s, as the

Pacific War precluded non-essential travel. From this experience came the idea of a
regional ecumenical Christian body to extend links within the Pacific.33 The World
Council of Churches was deeply involved in the meeting in Samoa and provided inter-
national speakers and financial support to those attending and later published the
findings. The theme – Paul’s letter to the Galatians – was widely promulgated
around Pacific congregations in the lead-up to the conference. Galatians is generally
interpreted as a call for Christian unity through Christ’s promise of salvation. It is an
attack on legalistic practices and efforts to gain God’s approval through the obser-
vance of particular rites and rituals; in the early church, this was largely related to
the question of circumcision. In the spirit of the rising ecumenism of the 1950s and
1960s, the theme chipped away at the fine distinctions of worship and liturgy that
divided the sectarian Christian Pacific societies. The Fijian and Tongan church
leaders sought a Pacific-style conference: the Revd Ronald K. Orchard, London sec-
retary of the International Missionary Council, noted that the organisers specifically
asked for the conference to include times of informal discussion to allow consensus.34
Lorine Tevi (later head of the Pacific Conference of Churches from 1976) claimed
that this allowed the inaugural meeting to be conducted according to ‘The Pacific
Way’.35
The Malua conference challenged the previous physical and denominational iso-
lation of Pacific Islanders and churches and spread further the new regionalism of
the post-war Pacific that had been inaugurated by the South Pacific Conference in
1950, when representatives of 14 Pacific Island territories gathered in Suva.36 This
earlier conference brought together the chiefly representatives of colonial advisory
councils or assemblies, such as Prince Tungi of Tonga and Ratu Edward Cakobau
of Fiji, with the emerging professionals and bureaucrats of Melanesia – Dr Kalsa-
kau of the New Hebrides, later a member of the Advisory Council, and Eluida
Ahnon and Aosilf Salin, clerks in the New Guinea Department of Education.37
A number of the Polynesian delegates to Suva went on to become prime ministers
or heads of state.38 The Malua church conference similarly predicted forthcoming
leaders of independent churches. Methodist Saimon Gaius, then a minister on pro-
bation, led the United Church of Papua and New Guinea to independence in
1966.39 Three years after the conference, Tuilivoni, charged with maintaining
the momentum of the first meeting, became leader of the Independent Methodist
33
Lorine Tevi, ‘The Pacific Conference of Churches’, in William Coop (ed.), Pacific Peoples Sing Out Strong
(New York 1976), 25.
34
R.K. Orchard, ‘Introductory essay’, in Beyond the Reef: records of the Conference of Churches and Missions in the Pacific
(Malua 1961), 5.
35
Tevi, ‘The Pacific Conference of Churches’, 25–30. For a discussion of ‘The Pacific Way’, see Stephanie
Lawson, ‘“The Pacific Way” as postcolonial discourse: towards a reassessment’, The Journal of Pacific History, 45:3
(2010), 297–314.
36
Greg Fry, ‘The South Pacific “experiment”: reflections on the origins of regional identity’, The Journal of Pacific
History, 32:2 (1997), 180.
37
Ibid., 187–8.
38
Ibid., 187.
39
Beyond the Reef, 108.
Church of Fiji. The conference also foreshadowed the Pacific relationship between
church and state. One Samoan delegate, deacon and lay preacher in the Congre-
gational Church, Kalapu Luafatasaga, was also Speaker of the Western Samoan
Legislative Assembly.40
The conference spread the word about the International Missionary Council and
the World Council of Churches, the latter gave financial support to convene regular
meetings of the ecumenical continuation committee.41 Tuilivoni and Samoan Vavae
Toma brought together youth leaders, identified external funding and extended the
ecumenical movement with visitations between the island groups.42 For the colonised
peoples of the Pacific this new church regionalism – and the meetings that followed,
which were spread around the Pacific – allowed participants to gain a vital and pre-
viously denied comparative insight, not merely into the workings of the multiple
churches of the Pacific, but also into distinctive colonial administrations. The
Malua conference laid the groundwork for the formation of the Pacific Conference
of Churches, which was established at the subsequent meeting in Lifou, New Caledo-
nia, in 1966, thus cementing the regionalism of the churches of the Pacific.43
While transnationalism and the crossing of cultural and political borders has
become an important historical method in the past decade, this paper considers
specifically the crossing of colonial borders and the reflexive perspective of the
home colony engendered by this experience, particularly in relation to the unique
Anglo/French Condominium of the New Hebrides.44 Increasingly in the 1960s, Pres-
byterians crossed colonial borders for education and for church meetings. Represent-
ing the PCNH at the Malua conference were Titus Path – moderator for 1961, pastor
at Hog Harbour, Santo, and later representative on the Advisory Council – and
Pastor Jonathon Wimbong, then working with the Big Nambas on Malekula. The
clerk of the assembly, New Zealand missionary Graham Horwell, also attended. He
was a keen promoter of the international ecumenical movement; he led the move
for the PCNH to join the World Council of Churches in 1961 and to accept the invi-
tation to send delegates to Malua.45 On their return to the New Hebrides the del-
egates presented a report of their experiences to the Presbyterian Assembly in
1962. The assembly approved a subscription for the Pacific Journal of Theology.46
Both Jonathon Wimbong and Titus Path went on to travel extensively within the
Pacific and beyond. As a representative of both church and colony, Titus Path
40
Ibid., 109.
41
Orchard, ‘Introductory essay’, Ibid., 8–9.
42
Charles W. Forman, The Voice of Many Waters (Suva 1986), 6–7.
43
Kambati Uriam, ‘Doing theology in the New Pacific’, in Phyllis Herda, Michael Reilly and David Hilliard (eds),
Vision and Reality in Pacific Religion: essays in honour of Niel Gunson (Canberra 2005), 300–1.
44
For the most conscious deployment of transnationalism in the Pacific, see Fiona Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific:
cultural internationalism and race politics in the women’s Pan-Pacific (Honolulu 2009). This analysis of the transnational experi-
ence of ni-Vanuatu pastors is possible through the painstaking work of Malcolm Campbell, who has traced the travel
experiences of moderators and clerks of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides/Vanuatu in Remember Your
Leaders.
45
Beyond the Reef, 109, 111; Campbell, Remember Your Leaders, 37–40; Minutes of the Twelfth Session of the Presby-
terian Church of the New Hebrides, 1960, 15, PMB DOC 219.
46
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Session of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides, 1962, 25, PMB DOC
219.
attended the South Pacific Conference of Governments in Lae, sponsored by the Con-
dominium government, and then travelled to New Caledonia to examine local and
regional councils. The following year, the Billy Graham organisation paid for his
travel to Germany, followed by an extensive tour through the US. In 1969, he tra-
velled to New Zealand, and during the 1970s he visited PNG, Fiji and Canada.47
Travel was a reflexive experience; it allowed a new perspective on the home colony
and for comparisons with other colonies. It also revealed the peculiar status of the
colonial subjects of the New Hebrides. Instead of passports, ni-Vanuatu travelled
with documents and letters that almost invariably failed the demands of customs offi-
cials. While the Condominium managed to patch over the ambiguous political status
of their colonial subjects within the colony – neither French nor British and unable to
be registered – the administrations could not resolve the problems of presenting this
undefined subject at the borders of other colonies and nations. As a result, ni-Vanuatu
were frequently stopped and harassed by customs officials. This humiliating – and
therefore politicising – experience was endured by increasing numbers of ni-
Vanuatu in the 1960s.48
The oft-repeated phrase from the first meeting of the Pacific churches at Malua in
1961 was that ‘the coconut curtain has lifted’.49 This call was prompted by the previous
isolation of Pacific churches, but the analogy is to the Cold War, and the comment was
made in the weeks immediately following the building of the Berlin Wall. Therefore, it
was a claim for ecumenism with strong political overtones. The Malua conference was
held on the eve of Samoa’s independence from New Zealand as the winds of post-war
decolonisation reached the Pacific Islands. This combination of church and political
interaction throughout the 1960s, supported by the liberal World Council of Churches,
was one route to an increasing political consciousness for the Indigenous clergy of the
New Hebrides.
Theological Training
The Tangoa Teachers Training Institute opened in the New Hebrides in 1895 to
provide teacher catechists and eventually pastors with Christian training. This was
the only education offered to ni-Vanuatu Presbyterians until the 1950s, and through-
out this period there was a perpetual struggle to raise the standard.50 The church
recognised the importance of a broader education, and in the 1950s and early
1960s promising students such as Titus Path, Jonathon Wimbong, Kami Shing,
Timhu, Vula Vutilolo and Charlie Nimoho were sent to the interdenominational
evangelical Sydney Missionary and Bible Training Institute.51 From the early
1960s, students were sent for theological training around the Pacific: to the Methodist
College of Davuilevu in Fiji, to the Congregational College of Malua in Samoa, to the
United Church Colleges of Malmaluan and Rarongo in East New Britain and
47
48
For an extensive discussion on the issues of citizenship in the Condominium, see Gregory Rawlings, ‘Stateless-
ness, human rights and decolonisation: citizenship in Vanuatu, 1906–80’, The Journal of Pacific History, 47 (2012), 45–68.
49
Garrett, Where Nets Were Cast, 309, 332.
50
Campbell, ‘A century of Presbyterian Mission education’, 85–108.
51
Malcolm Campbell, interview, 18 July 2011.
eventually to the Pacific Theological College in Suva. Here young ordinands experi-
enced the decolonisation of churches and nations in the region. Those engaged in
pastor training were exposed to the theologians of political action such as Bonhoeffer
and the Niebuhr brothers. For many ni-Vanuatu Presbyterians, therefore, the stirrings
of political consciousness occurred outside the colony, as new opportunities for travel
combined with the increasingly political theologies of the 1960s.
As ni-Vanuatu church scholars were moving beyond the horizons of the New Heb-
rides, a new cohort of students was being educated in the new Presbyterian schools
developed as part of Victor Coombes’s ten-year plan. While some Australasian mis-
sionaries may have been conservative in their views of Indigenous leadership, scholars
of Onesua High School, such as Allen Nafuki (subsequently pastor and member of
parliament), recalled learning of Presbyterian support for ni-Vanuatu against external
exploiters, beginning with the sandalwood traders and continuing with the colonial
administrations and the alienation of land:
And then when I went to Onesua Presbyterian Church College … we had a lot of teachers
from NZ and all the missionaries were telling us about the struggle that we were facing by
the French and the British government … I came to know that the missionaries were fight-
ing for our freedom.52
Concerned that the Presbyterian schools would produce an anglophone elite, the
French administration greatly expanded their education programme throughout
the 1960s, not merely to increase the French-speaking proportion of the population
but, more crucially, to extend French influence into the village and beyond the tra-
ditional anglophone/francophone divide of the Protestant and Catholic churches.53
Allen Nafuki’s family was split by the competing education policies of the Condomi-
nium. His family could just afford the fees for his education, but financial circum-
stances dictated that his younger brothers were sent to French schools.
Standards at the new Presbyterian schools were relatively high, but the theological
training at Tangoa Training Institute remained at the level of a basic Christian edu-
cation, and students were sent for higher training to theological colleges around the
Pacific. The first was Fred Timakata; born on Emae to a chiefly family, he enrolled
at Davuilevu Methodist Theological College in Fiji in 1962. Here he gained experi-
ence of the ecumenical movement, led by Fijian Methodists, and the accelerated inde-
pendence of the Pacific Churches. Timakata was present when the Methodist Church
of Fiji and Rotuma separated from the circuits of Australasia to become independent
in 1964.54
Sethy Regenvanu attended youth leadership training at Malmaluan on the Gazelle
Peninsula in East New Britain in 1966, where he met young men and women from
throughout the Pacific. The Gazelle Peninsula was a revelation to him. Observing
Tolai engagement in the economy and politics was a profoundly politicising experi-
ence that revealed the failures of the Condominium. He was also frustrated that the
52
Allen Nafuki, interview, 18 Aug. 2010.
53
William F.S. Miles, ‘Froncophonie in post-colonial Vanuatu’, The Journal of Pacific History, 29 (1994), 54.
54
PCNH did not do more to challenge colonial mores either within the church or the
colony:
My relationship with white people was that we were second class and I accepted that as the
way it should be. But then when I went to PNG it opened my eyes. How the people in
PNG, particularly Tolai [in East New Britain] because I was at Malmaluan, how they
handled themselves, political leaders, also how they were involved in the economy,
because Tolai were involved in cocoa production and cocoa marketing and so on and
transport [business] in the way that I had never seen before. And they in turn were
giving employment to other Papua New Guineans from the Highlands. And so this is
what impressed me black people were doing things that were in the exclusive domain
of whites in the New Hebrides. Melanesian like us. And I watched them and I read
Michael Somare’s book … I hadn’t thought that a black man could write a book. And
I read it and I thought this is all possible. I saw possibilities beyond limits.55
Returning to the New Hebrides in 1967, Regenvanu was bitterly disillusioned
by the standard of Bible education at the Tangoa Theological Training Institute.
But the church was aware of the problems and Dorothy Rutter was recruited to
prepare students for the new Pacific Theological College planned for Suva, the
first degree-conferring institute in the South Pacific.56 Trained in anthropology
at the University of Queensland and in theology at the ecumenical United
Faculty of Theology in Melbourne, Rutter combined a liberal education with
the social activism of the Student Christian Movement and recalled of her time
in Melbourne that ‘there was a strong feeling there of the need to get involved
in government, politics’.57 In her assessment of the Student Christian Movement
of the 1960s and the vigorous debates on radical ‘secular’ Christianity in Australia,
Renate Howe described the excitement generated by the theologies of Tillich and
Bonhoeffer, the radical calls from within the SCM for the ‘death of religion’ and
the religious institutions of Christianity, and the demand that Christ be experienced
through day-to-day life.58 Rutter took her experiences and theological training to
the New Hebrides and was disappointed that the Presbyterian Church was not sup-
portive of the Nagriamel land movement of Jimmy Stevens or of those who sought
improved wages and conditions for copra cutters.59 Her marriage to Sethy Regen-
vanu, unthinkable a generation earlier, was questioned by some on the Presbyter-
ian mission – though many were less concerned by an interracial marriage than by
the influence of Rutter’s radical theological ideas – but the union was supported by
the college principal, the Revd Paddy Jensen.60
Fred Timakata was the first ni-Vanuatu to graduate from the Pacific Theological
College. He was exposed to a challenging Pacific-based theological training, with the
standards set at Western theological schools and a curriculum based on London Uni-
versity, though there was increasing criticism of the hegemony of European theology
55
Dorothy and Sethy Regenvanu, interview, 22 Aug. 2010.
56
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Session of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the New Heb-
rides, 1965, 9, PMB DOC 219.
57
58
Renate Howe, A Century of Influence: the Australian Student Christian Movement 1896–1996 (Sydney 2009), 354–7.
59
60
Regenvanu, Laef Blong Mi, 68.
and a concomitant demand that the gospel be interpreted in Pacific settings.61 There-
fore students were urged to develop critical thinking and a high level of reflexivity on
church and village, culture and the universal reception of the gospel. The following is
an example of an exam question from 1967: ‘Discuss the acquisition and use of power
by Either the chief in a “family-state” OR a council of elders in a gerontocratic society.
Critically examine the system described in the light of the teaching of the Gospel’.62
After completing his studies, Timakata was appointed to Noumea to minister to the
Presbyterians at the nickel mine, then to Malekula. He returned to Port Vila in
1974 to become the first ni-Vanuatu clerk of the Presbyterian Assembly. As with
Regenvanu, his experiences broke the village expectations of marriage: while studying
in Suva he married a Tongan woman Keasi Leisei, daughter of a Methodist pastor.63
Dorothy and Sethy Regenvanu followed Timakata to the Pacific Theological

College in 1970 in time for Fiji’s independence celebrations.64 Sethy Regenvanu rep-
resented the Pacific Theological College at the Pacific Conference of Churches
meeting held in Suva in 1971 and met the Revd Dr Philip Potter, West Indian
general secretary of the World Council of Churches, who ‘left a permanent and inspir-
ing impression on me as a black man leading this world ecumenical organization’.65
As with the African and Asian student associations in post-war Britain, the Regenva-
nus were involved in the New Hebridean Association and met frequently with increas-
ingly radical fellow ni-Vanuatu students attending the University of the South Pacific
such as Barak Sope, Grace Molisa and Kalkot Matas Kele Kele, all of whom went on
to become leaders in the independence movement.66
What Regenvanu could not experience in Suva was an independence movement
against an empire resistant to decolonisation. The French were covertly seeking to
maintain the New Hebrides as a French settler colony and challenged British
efforts to encourage an educated Indigenous elite to take the reins of self-government
and forge a viable nation from the divided Condominium. As Van Trease notes,
during the 1960s the French sought to entrench the divide between French and
British services and anglophone and francophone ni-Vanuatu. In 1969 French Resi-
dent Commissioner Mouradian reflected that during his tenure he had refused all
British efforts to integrate laws and legal procedures or to extend local councils. He
rejected plans for a joint hospital and ‘applied the brakes’ to further democratisation
of the Advisory Council beyond the minimal changes in the late 1960s.67
In 1969, Pastor Jack Taritonga – then moderator of the northern islands – travelled
to Port Moresby with Pastor Philip Shing, convenor of the Ministry Committee,
for the inaugural meeting of the Melanesian Association of Theological Schools.
61
Uriam, ‘Doing theology in the New Pacific’, 302.
62
Question four, Diploma examination in ‘Custom and the Gospel’, Nov. 1967, Suva, Pacific Theological College
Archives.
63
64
Regenvanu, Laef Blong Mi, 85.
65
Ibid.
66
A.J. Stockwell, ‘Leaders, dissidents and the disappointed: colonial students in Britain as empire ended’, Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36:3 (2008), 493–4. Sethy and Dorothy Regenvanu, interview, 22 Aug. 2010.
67
Howard Van Trease, ‘Colonial origins of Vanuatu politics’, in Howard Van Trease (ed.), Melanesian Politics: stael
blong Vanuatu (Christchurch 1995), 16.
They also visited East New Britain to consider a joint theological college with the
United Church of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in the years following the
merging of the Congregational and Methodist Churches.68 The decision was made
to send students from the New Hebrides to East New Britain, home to both the Mal-
maluan Christian Education Centre and the Rarongo Theological Centre.
Those Presbyterian students who travelled to New Britain for theological training
encountered the anti-colonial movement of the Matanguan Association and the com-
plexities of Australia’s decolonisation process on the Gazelle Peninsula. For Allen
Nafuki, who studied with the brother of Tolai political leader John Kaputin in
1970–71, the extracurricular opportunities were deeply politicising. He regularly
visited the Kaputin home, attended Matanguan Association meetings and recalled
that ‘I could see very clearly that John Kaputin was doing something right for his
people’. He returned to the New Hebrides in 1972 when the new educated elite, prin-
cipally pastors and British-trained teachers and civil servants, began organising and
agitating for political change. The New Hebridean Cultural Association had been
formed the year before by Onesua-educated Presbyterian teachers Peter Taurakoto
and Donald Kalpokas.69 Initially focused on land alienation on the island of
Lelepa, within a few weeks the association transformed into a fully-fledged political
party led by the young Anglican priests Walter Lini and John Bani and lay Anglican
Aiden Garae, though the three men were dispersed throughout the colony and
struggled to maintain the original momentum.70 Lini drew on his previous experience
in small political publications to spread the word: he organised the Western Pacific
students while a student in Auckland and published Onetalk, and he observed the pub-
lishing of the Kakamora Reporter at his first posting in the Solomon Islands.71 After the
formation of the National Party, he established the New Hebridean Viewpoints as a
mouthpiece for the new movement. Nafuki attended an early meeting on Iririki
Island, where Walter Lini exhorted pastors, chiefs and landowners to support the
movement and pledge five Australian dollars.72
Nafuki returned to East New Britain for theological training at Rarongo in 1973.
Here, in the lead-up to the independence of Papua New Guinea, at the most political
site of the Australian colony, he encountered the radical theologies of the period:
And we got the announcement that they would get independence in 1975 and I was in
Rarongo then … all our teachers would come and instead of running theological
studies or subjects we would talk about the situation. And that’s when I started to really
get deep when I went to Rarongo. Malmaluan I only got involved because of my relation-
ship. But Rarongo I began to really study … the political situation in PNG.
68
Campbell, Remember Your Leaders, 97, 98.
69
The literature on the New Hebridean Cultural Association is relatively extensive, but new details have recently
been provided by founder Peter Taurokoto, ‘New Hebrides Cultural Association’, in Prior, 25 Tingting, 5–11.
70
The literature on the formation of the Vanua’aku Party is extensive; for a detailed discussion, see Van Trease,
The Politics of Land in Vanuatu, 206–10.
71
Terry M. Brown, ‘The Anglican Church and the Vanuatu independence movement: solidarity and ambiguity’,
Working Paper 7, Alfred Deakin Research Institute (2010), 14.
72
He also considered explicitly the question of the relationship between church and state
and how his increasing interest in decolonisation could be viewed through a theologi-
cal lens:
But when I was there I thought this is theological training I need to really get down to this
and get to know the difference between church and politics and church and state. What
roles can the church play? If we want people to get free what can we do? So this kind of
very radical Christians began to creep into my mind.
On his return to the New Hebrides in 1976, Nafuki combined his duties as a pastor
with his political work for the National Party on the politically sensitive island of
Santo, where his parish extended to the Nagriamel base of Tanafo.73
Back in Suva, Regenvanu and his fellow ni-Vanuatu students sought ways to
support the National Party and raise national and anticolonial consciousness
beyond the Nagriamel movement in Santo. The opportunity to influence the Presby-
terian Church came with the South Pacific Action for Development Strategy Confer-
ence (SPADES) in January 1973. The conference was led by Fijian activist and
Methodist Pastor Sitiveni Ratuvili, who was employed by the Pacific Conference of
Churches to lead the committee of activists from the Student Christian Movement
and students from the Pacific Theological College representing Fiji, Western
Samoa, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and the New Hebrides.74 Support was
also provided by the World Council of Churches and the Melanesian Council of
Churches. Thirty delegates met for a week in one of three locations: Apia, Suva or
Tanna, then joined for a final week in Port Vila.75 While pastors or theological stu-
dents dominated the proceedings, the delegation also included social workers, teachers
and students from a range of faculties.76
The four advisers – Roxanne (Roxy) and Bill Coop, Rex Davis and Appolinarius
Macha – revealed the political flavour of the conference.77 American Presbyterians
Roxy and Bill Coop had offered themselves for work in Christian education in the
New Hebrides in 1970. The Vila church cautioned them with a note that, in
matters of doctrine and ethics, they were generally conservative.78 The note was
ignored, for the young Americans were aggressive missionaries for the radical political
theologies of the 1970s. Roxy Coop was active in the civil rights movement and in
second-wave feminism in the US, and she held a postgraduate degree in Christian
education. The Coops were profoundly anticolonial and expressed their politics
through the nexus of theology and education advocated by liberation theologians,
who were increasingly turning their focus on the Pacific: radical Catholic philosopher
Ivan Illich spoke in Suva in 1972 – Regenvanu attended – and Catholic Marxist edu-
cationalist Paulo Freire attended the Waigani Seminar in Papua New Guinea in 1974;
his call to action, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), was taught at the Pacific Theological
73
Ibid.
74
Report of the SPADES Conference, Port Vila, 1973, 3, Suva, Pacific Theological College Archives.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid., 25–7.
77
Ibid., 29.
78
Lake, ‘The educational policy of the Presbyterian Church’, 295.
College.79 Rex Davis had been involved in a similar development conference in Papua
New Guinea in 1970 and represented the World Council of Churches, which pro-
vided financial support to SPADES.80 Representing the Christian activist search for
alternative models of state and nation was Appolinarius Macha of Tanzania, who
held a diploma in social leadership from St Francis Xavier University in Canada
and was an administrative officer in development in the Tanzanian administration.81
Tanzania’s model of Christian socialism was admired by Christian activists around the
Pacific; representatives of Tanzania received invitations to development conferences
throughout the region and influenced leaders such as Ebia Olewale in Papua New
Guinea as well as Walter Lini.82
The conference concluded at Port Vila with a series of public meetings held in
the British Paddock with the permission of the British administration, which was
tacitly supporting the ni-Vanuatu civil servants who had founded the National
Party.83 The British were forced to withdraw support when the fierce debates
and overtly political demands of the delegates threatened to expose their hand in
the development of anticolonial sentiment. At the time, however, delegates were
scathing in their assessment of the British attack on free speech.84 While the ‘devel-
opment’ focus of the conference came under the banners of education, tourism and
urbanisation, the resolutions revealed the expressly anticolonial demands of the
delegation:
We the delegates of SPADES Conference – concerned for human life, the free develop-
ment of all people, and the conservation of our environment
. Assert that all people under colonial government in the Pacific are oppressed and
exploited. We therefore condemn colonialism in all its forms.
. Assert that in countries where indigenous people are not heard, we support
moves to bring about political freedom.
. Assert that culture identifies people and their environment and that it should not
at any cost be exploited.
. Urge that the Church review its place and mission in society.85
The New Hebrides delegates embodied the nexus between political activism and
radical theology. All were leaders or members of the National Party and included
Walter Lini and Sethy Regenvanu.86 By now the National Party had growing
79
Paulo Freire, ‘Liberation through literacy’, in J. Brammall and Ronald J. May (eds), Education in Melanesia: papers
delivers[sic] a [sic] the Eight [sic] Waigani Seminar… (Port Moresby 1974), 245–50. Bruce Deverell, ‘Models in theological
education: the role of the Christian educator at the Pacific Theological College Suva’, DMin thesis, Pacific School of
Religion (Berkeley 1986), 343.
80
Ibid., 28.
81
Ibid.
82
See for example Rapael Kiyao ‘Education in Tanzania’, in Brammall and May, Education in Melanesia, 50–7. See
also David Chappell, ‘“Africanization” in the Pacific: blaming others for disorder in the periphery?’, Comparative Studies
in Society and History, 47:2 (2005), 302.
83
Peter Taurakoto, ‘The New Hebrides Cultural Association’, in Prior, 25 Tingting, 10.
84
John Soper, ‘The church and development’, New Hebridean Viewpoints, 9 (Mar. 1973).
85
‘Resolutions’, Report of the SPADES Conference, 3.
86
‘Conference Participants’, Report of the SPADES Conference, 26.
support in Port Vila with approximately 40 subcommittees established around the

islands.87 The March Viewpoints was devoted almost entirely to the conference with
a press statement by Roxana Coop on the findings and resolutions.88
Sethy Regenvanu returned to his studies in Suva, while civil servant George
Kalkoa – member of the Advisory Council, National Party member and later,
under the chiefly title of George Sokomanu, the first President of Vanuatu – took
the SPADES report and resolutions to the next Presbyterian Assembly at Lenakel
on Tanna, led by moderator Jack Taritonga. For delegates, Kalkoa’s report,
written with the assistance of Anglican priest John Bani, ‘helped the Church to find
its voice and speak its mind on the political and economic side of New Hebridean
life’. The church was to be central to this new vision: ‘The moral power of the
Church can be our greatest friend as we move from colonialism toward a new life
of freedom’.89 Kalkoa’s report was printed verbatim in Viewpoints and was a blueprint
of activist Christianity viewed through the sociological lens that was increasingly
linked with the theology of the period. As theologically all ‘men are created in the
image of God, [and] are equal before him’, it was the task of the Church to tend to
both the spiritual and material wellbeing of parishioners and to ‘denounce colonial
ideas and principles’. Inspiration and an argument against those who argued for
the separation of church and state came from Africa, where the son of the Church
of Scotland minister Kenneth Kaunda had led Zambia to independence in 1964,
stating that ‘Christians will be active in every part of the life of the nation’. So,
noted Kalkoa, ‘it should be in the New Hebrides’. The call to political independence
combined the theological hope for continuing revelation with the political hope for
freedom from oppression: ‘Jesus Christ will have to become flesh once again here
and now’.90 New Zealand minister Ken Calvert recalled that the bedtime reading
for delegates was Franz Fanon’s anticolonial tract, Wretched of the Earth, which analysed
French colonialism in Algeria and the strategies of divide and rule through which the
French administration sought to retain control of their North African colonies.91
At the following Presbyterian Assembly at Lenakal on Tanna, Bill Coop intro-
duced a motion condemning the French nuclear testing on Moruroa. Around the
Pacific the churches, led by the regional church associations, were taking a strong
stand against the tests.92 The motion was referred to a subcommittee and quickly
expanded its brief to a broader response on colonialism. Lawyer-cum-missionary
Graham Miller drafted a motion on the church’s view of the independence of the
New Hebrides:
The Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides, representing more than half of the popu-
lation of the New Hebrides, in this its 25th General Assembly as a self-governing Church,
87
Kalkot Matas Kele-Kele, ‘The emergence of political parties’, in Chris Plant (ed.), New Hebrides: the road to inde-
pendence (Suva 1977), 25.
88
New Hebridean Viewpoints, 9 (Mar. 1973).
89
Ibid., 2.
90
Ibid., 2, 3.
91
Ken Calvert to Malcolm Campbell, interview, n.d.
92
Pacific Conference of Churches Secretariat, ‘The Pacific as an arena of increasing competition, conflict and
struggle’, in Coop, Pacific People Sing Out Strong, 12.
DECLARES that it confidently looks towards the goal of responsible self-government of

the New Hebrides people as a nation.
We see the British, French and Condominium administration as partners with us as
together we move towards this goal.
We now bring this conviction to the notice of our administrations and to the attention
of the South Pacific Commission and the United Nations Organization with the urgent
request that they co-operate with our New Hebrides administrations in achieving self-gov-
ernment without delay, without violence, and with due preparation of our people for the
duties, functions, rights and responsibilities of independent government.93
Following the procedures of the Presbyterian Assembly, the motion was put to the vote
and passed. In view of French opposition to independence, Taritonga’s text from
Hebrews was apposite: ‘For faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1 KJV).94 Also present at the assembly was Setareki
Tuilivoni, the Fijian leader of the Methodist Church and founding member of the
Pacific Conference of Churches. The following Viewpoints, titled ‘The church and
development’, was devoted almost entirely to the conference and the assembly.95
Two other important initiatives came from the Lenakel assembly. The first was the
establishment of a Church and Society Committee, which was overtly focused on pol-
itical issues and the spread of national consciousness; these committees were being
developed around the Pacific and reflected the increasing church engagement in
Pacific politics. Unlike all other Presbyterian Church committees, the Church and
Society group included lay people and clergy of other denominations who were the
key figures in the National Party: Anglican priests Walter Lini and John Bani; Peter
Taurakoto, one of the founders of the National Party; and George Kalkoa.96
Under the second initiative, the role of assembly clerk was handed from the Austra-
lasian missionaries to Fred Timakata.97 Thus the last vestige of colonialism within
the church finally crumbled. While ni-Vanuatu had been moderators of the PCNH
since the late 1950s, the post of assembly clerk had been held by four Australasian mis-
sionaries from 1948. The last, Neal Whimp, only accepted the position on the under-
standing he would hand the post to a ni-Vanuatu as soon as possible.
Fred Timakata accepted the positions of clerk of the Presbyterian Assembly and
vice-president of the National Party almost simultaneously. The following year
Father Walter Lini became the leader.98 The party, which had begun as a movement
led by members of the British National Service, was now led by clergy.99 Timakata
was galvanised into politics by his inability to register his son’s birth in 1970. As a
pastor and National Party member on Malekula, he became involved in the land
struggles against French planters.100
93
‘The Presbyterian Church’s declaration of its conviction concerning independence’, New Hebridean Viewpoints, 10
(June–July 1973), 1.
94
95
New Hebridean Viewpoints, 10 (June–July 1973).
96
Proceedings of the 26th Session of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides, 1974, 19. (I am grateful to
Malcolm Campbell for providing copies of material from this assembly.)
97
98
Allen Nafuki, ‘Walter Hadye Lini’, in Macdonald-Milne and Thomas, Yumi Stanap, 12.
99
Shadrack Vulum, ‘Fred Timakata’, in Macdonald-Milne and Thomas, Yumi Stanap, 53–6.
100
In the seven turbulent years between the Lenakel assembly and the independence
of Vanuatu in 1980, those in the upper echelons of the church and the pastors in the
field combined their church and political work. Sethy Regenvanu returned from Suva
after completing his thesis on adult Christian education in the New Hebrides in 1973.
He took over the post of Christian education officer from Bill and Roxy Coop and
began applying the blueprint of his thesis to spread the message of the National
Party. The thesis essentially tied Paulo Freire’s theories of adult education to the struc-
ture of the Presbyterian Church.101
What I did was I had decided through my thesis that the structure I would use was the
church structure: assembly, presbytery, sessions, congregations. If I followed that system
and built my programme I would be able to reach everyone. That was my thesis.102
He appointed Christian education workers to all the presbyteries to ensure regular ses-
sions on political issues. He then ran workshops with this ‘network of agents’ to discuss
leadership, disseminate National Party information and in the process develop political
and national consciousness. Regenvanu was quietly assisted by the British administration
as a church representative for formal education. Under this role, he travelled extensively
throughout the New Hebrides and would piggyback his political activities onto his admin-
istration tasks, holding concurrent political meetings with presbyteries and sessions while
representing the administration and church at district education committees.103
On Santo, Allen Nafuki organised as a National Party member and pastor. The
French had drawn the Nagriamel movement into the Francophone sphere with the
promise to return alienated land. French influence was greatly enhanced in those
islands north of Efate, and Nagriamal members supported the Francophone parties
formed in opposition to the National Party.104 As his parish spread to the Nagriamel
base at Vanuafoe, Nafuki was careful to tailor his message to his audience. To Nagria-
mel members he spread the gospel of liberation:
I made sure – because I was their pastor – I made sure that I would only teach from the
Bible. It would not be seen as me talking. I would hide behind the word of God and
present the liberation [theology], and that’s how they got to know me, and they began
to see not only is Pastor Allen talking but the word of God is talking to them.105
With Presbyterians unaffiliated with the Nagriamel movement, however, he organised
for the National Party. The declaration for independence at the Lenakel assembly
bound the Presbyterian clergy to the cause:
All of us – the chief, the pastors, the elders – we have a committee meeting together, and I
would tell them about why don’t we form a committee to fund-raise to assist us in the
National movement. And then the chief would get up and say okay; we would get a
date, and everybody would raise money and give to our local subcommittee, who were
101
Sethy John [Regenvanu], ‘A proposed plan for adult Christian education in the Presbyterian Church of the
New Hebrides’ BDiv thesis, Pacific Theological College (Suva 1973). At this time Regenvanu went by the name
Sethy John.
102
Sethy and Dorothy Regenvanu, interview, 22 Aug. 2010.
103
Ibid.
104
Van Trease, ‘The colonial origins of Vanuatu politics’, 18–19.
105
the national party. All the pastors in our Presbyterian Church [worked for the National
Party] because of the decision made at Lenakel in 1973.106
Following the declaration at Lenakel, church leaders travelled extensively for political
purposes. Moderator Jack Taritonga met with members of the Australian Council of
Churches to discuss political independence for the New Hebrides. As part of the team
led by Walter Lini, he spent five weeks in Paris and England negotiating self-govern-
ment and finance.107 As clerk of the assembly and vice-president of the National Party,
Fred Timakata combined church and political duties. He was delegate to both the
Pacific Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches and served on the
executive of the former. He sought New Zealand and Australian support for indepen-
dence in the mid 1970s. On visits to London and Paris, he spoke to the World Council
of Churches as well as with the British and French governments. With Lini and Barak
Sope – a key figure in the National Party – he represented the New Hebrides to the
Committee of 24 at the United Nations in 1978.108
The London talks of November 1974 on the political future of the New Hebrides were
held between Britain, France and their respective colonial officials, though ni-Vanuatu
were not represented. In recognition of the damage caused by travel documents, the
London meeting announced that, as well as granting the New Hebrides a Representative
Assembly and a new system of local government, ni-Vanuatu were to gain a new status:
We understand that, whilst stopping short of giving New Hebrideans double nationality it
will give them, when outside the New Hebrides, a choice of the same rights of protection
by Britain and France as those enjoyed respectively by British and French nationals. New
Hebrideans will be issued with a proper passport in place of the travel documents which
they now carry and this would be fully backed by both Britain and France.109
But the changes did not come soon enough to provide protection to travelling pastors.
In a final irony, during a visit to Nairobi for the World Council of Churches meeting
in 1975 and while leader of the Presbyterian Church and vice-president of the most
widespread of the political parties in the colony, Timakata was detained in Madras
for several days as Indian customs officials struggled with his travel documents.110
Despite French efforts to split the vote between the ‘moderate’ French parties and
the National Party, the first elections for the Representative Assembly delivered the
National Party 59% of the ni-Vanuatu vote and a majority of two in the universal suf-
frage seats. But the party was unable to form a government, owing to the large
number of seats allocated to the Chamber of Commerce. The National Party boy-
cotted the assembly, and as the stalemate could not be resolved, the party – now
renamed the Vanua’aku Pati – declared that they would recognise neither the assem-
bly nor the British and French governments and formed a People’s Provisional Gov-
ernment with flag raisings around the country and at Port Vila.111 Fred Timakata was
106
Ibid.
107
Campbell, Remember your Leaders, 98.
108
Ibid. For details on the Committee of 24 (Special Committee on Decolonization), see http://www.un.org/en/
decolonization/specialcommittee.shtml.
109
Proceedings of the New Hebrides Advisory Council, 26th session, 10–17 Dec. 1974, 2.
110
Campbell, Remember your Leaders, 162.
111
Van Trease, The Politics of Land in Vanuatu, 229–31.
charged with explaining the Vanua’aku Pati decision to the Australian foreign minis-
ter in the Fraser government, Andrew Peacock.
The stalemate forced Britain and France to find a political solution. The resultant
Dijoud Plan set the blueprint for decolonisation, including the drafting of a new con-
stitution with representatives from the political parties, the chiefs, the churches and
Nagiramel. The proposed cabinet for a Government of National Unity to rule until
elections could be held included five Vanua’aku Pati ministers. The chief minister
in this transitional government was Catholic priest and activist Gérard Lemang.112
Regenvanu and Apostolic lay activist Madeline Kalchichi were the representatives
of the New Hebrides Christian Council on the committee for the constitution. They
hired as their legal adviser a devout Catholic lawyer from Papua New Guinea,
Bernard Narokobi, who had worked on the PNG constitution with Catholic priest
John Momis and was at the time engaged in the writing of The Melanesian Way. 113
Regenvanu recalled that, with the assistance of Narokobi, the well-organised
Vanua’aku Pati and church representatives were able to make submissions to the com-
mittee before any others. As a result their submissions formed the basis of the final
version that was taken around the colony by members of the constitutional committee
for discussion at village-level meetings.114
The elections preceding independence in November 1979 voted the Vanua’aku Pati
into power with over 60% of the popular vote and a significant majority of the assembly
of 39 seats.115 The platform was the return of alienated land, the development of
Vanuatu and respect for kastom. At the independence of the nation in 1980 the first gov-
ernment, formed by the Vanua’aku Pati, included five Presbyterian pastors and was led
by Anglican priest Father Walter Lini as prime minister. Pastor Fred Timakata was
deputy prime minister and minister of home affairs. Pastor Sethy Regenvanu was the
minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries. Pastor Willie Korisa was the minister for
health. Pastor Jack Taritonga, moderator of the Presbyterian Assembly at the call for
independence on Tanna in 1973, was also elected. Those Presbyterian members of par-
liament who were not pastors, such as Donald Kalpokas, were almost exclusively elders,
also an ordained position and a very significant post in church and village life in Vanuatu.
While all the churches were involved in the decolonisation of Vanuatu, the Presby-
terian Church was active as an institution; the church worked openly to raise national
consciousness and spread the word of independence around the colony. The indepen-
dence of the Presbyterian Church gave ni-Vanuatu the experience of church leader-
ship and organisation which was put into practice in the 1970s. Pastors developed
both theological knowledge and political skills through their engagement in the spiri-
tual and temporal elements of the Presbyterian Church. These political skills – necess-
ary prerequisites for independence from the Condominium – were readily translated
to the early forms of political representation in the colony and then the representative
112
Ibid., 232.
113
Barry MacDonald-Milne, ‘Leadership in Vanuatu’, in Prior, 25 Tingting, 3. For a discussion of the concept
‘Melanesia’ see Stephanie Lawson, ‘Melanesia: the history and politics of an idea’, The Journal of Pacific History, 48:1
(2013), 1–21.
114
Sethy and Dorothy Regenvanu, interview, 22 Aug. 2010.
115
Van Trease, The Politics of Land in Vanuatu, 235.
assembly of the nation. As pastors gained their education in other decolonising nations
of the South Pacific, such as Papua New Guinea and Fiji, they interacted with the
emerging educated elite of the South Pacific and were exposed to the radical theolo-
gical ideas of the 1960s and 1970s. They returned to the New Hebrides determined to
fight for political change and used Presbyterian committees and the structures of the
church as arteries for the raising and promotion of anticolonial sentiments. Thus, the
Presbyterian Church worked to develop a nationalist movement that was acceptable
to the British and provided many members of the first government of Vanuatu.

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Praying for Independence

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MISSIONS, COLONISATION AND COLONIALISM IN THE PACIFIC

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stitution through the strict Presbyterian process of meetings and committees.14

reformed to consist of 14 indirectly elected private members: three British, three

Indigenous representative from 1963 to 1971, though he had a fundamental com-

attended ecumenical conferences while stranded in Australia in the 1940s, as the

Dorothy and Sethy Regenvanu followed Timakata to the Pacific Theological

support in Port Vila with approximately 40 subcommittees established around the

DECLARES that it confidently looks towards the goal of responsible self-government of

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